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First Prologue

They brought a womanfrom the street And made hersit in the stalls By threats By bribes By flattery Obliging her to sharea little of her lifewith actors

But I don't understand art

Sit still, they said

But I don't want to see sad things

Sit still, they said

And she listened to everything Understanding some things But not others Laughing rarely,and always without knowing why Sometimes suffering disgust Sometimes thoroughly amazed And in the light again, said

If that's art I think it is hard workIt was beyond meSo much beyond my actual life

But something troubled her Something gnawed her peace And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said

And again,she listened to everything This timeunderstanding different things This timeuntroubled that some things Could not be understood Laughing rarelybut now without shame Sometimes suffering disgust Sometimes thoroughly amazed And in the light again said

This is art,it is hard workAnd one friend said, too hard for meAnd the other said,if you willI will come againBecause I found it hardI felt honoured

From the dressing room...

"I want to see, real, living, and in the hour of my own days, that glory which I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry."

17 February, 2012

Time, it seems, has a funny way of imprinting itself on your memories.

Time, it seems, has a funny way of imprinting itself on your memories. The grey land of Nerchinsk, with its worn roads, its forests, fences, and horizons laced with countless metallurgical operations—all of it had altered.

Or perhaps it hadn’t.
Perhaps it was merely their perception, altered.

The sky, once leaden was now a luminescent blue—heavy as eyelids fighting sleep. Clouds of smoke came belching up from little chimneys in great billows, where once there had been only threads, fading into night. The already stark landscape of the taiga with its muddy hills and lonely trees, obliterated into swamp and shrub and an undergrowth of rubble. The barrack sheds and village shacks once only smudges of blackened wood, now betrayed faded shocks of color—window shutters, painted doors and makeshift murals. Silence had been pumiced by sounds of picks and carts and heavy hammers, creaking gates, cows and chickens, silverware and screeches. Above all, the wailing whistle as the train approached from the parallel tracks of the ever-growing Great Railway.

Eastern winds that once wafted smells from deepest Asia, now blew only minerals from the ever-expanding mines: the sour sickness of sulfur, the sharpness of silver, and the harshly cleansing scorch of salt that burned the nostrils as you searched to define it further.

Not to be forgotten, was all of them—memories, shadows and friends alike. They had been rubbed down, they lay worn and raw like scraps of glass washed up upon the shores by the frigid waters of the Nercha. One could see what could never have been seen before: that Nerchinsk indeed held good men, and dark ones, and those so torn apart by madness they scarcely knew themselves. Time leached all that was impure from the companions until all that remained was the world-weariness, the churlish tempers, and the intricate psychological scaffoldings, which could not be kept up or down under the pummeling of Siberian days.

It was these little things.
Nothing can compare to the first moments one realizes that time has more than simply “passed,”
but indeed, that things are older.
And they were.
Older.
Days passed and grew to weeks, weeks grew to months, which succeeded each other one after the other, and swiftly grew to years.

They were nearer to ash, to dust, to eternity, than they have ever been before.